99% of all businesses in Continental Europe are small businesses -- restaurants, book shops, barbers, law firms, and electricians. These 22 million small business owners spend their days bringing our world to life, but have been chronically underserved when it comes to the software they need to run their businesses.

The most trusted advisor to these businesses is their accountant. These accountants, who invest seven years of their lives training for their profession, have also been underserved. They are left to sift through stacks of paper, manually reconcile transactions, and chase down missing paperwork.

We live in a world where we can order groceries to our doorstep with the click of a button, where we can send money around the world from our phones, where we can land rockets backwards, but these accountants and business owners are stuck using software built 40 years ago that doesn’t serve their needs.

The reason? Building software that can truly handle the complexities of accounting is very, very hard. So most teams building modern software tackle the areas in the financial stack that are more approachable.

But not Pennylane. Pennylane has obsessed about every detail and done the hard work to build a reliable accounting platform that brings state of the art automation to accountants and real time insights to small business owners for the first time. The team built that platform to handle all the financial needs of a business owner including expense management, banking, cash management, and e-invoicing.

Accountants love Pennylane. Accountants told us that Pennylane makes them 10 times more productive and allows them to spend more time as a strategic advisor to their clients. They told us that they felt using Pennylane was a strategic advantage for their business.

Businesses love Pennylane too. Dozens of business owners told us that Pennylane gives them real time visibility into their financials for the first time. Even more told us that having their entire financial suite in one place -- from accounting to banking to expenses -- makes everything more efficient and less expensive. Business owners even told us that they chose their accountant because the accountant was using Pennylane. 

We spent a year developing our perspective on how back office technology in Europe will evolve, and how upcoming e-invoicing could change the current landscape. When we met the Pennylane team we knew they were the ones who could make the difference for these accountants and small businesses. 

Pennylane has earned the trust of thousands of accounting firms and hundreds of thousands of businesses, built one of the best technical teams in Europe, and developed a culture that is humble, pragmatic, and high velocity. But perhaps what we love most about the Pennylane team is how deeply committed they are to their customers.

Pennylane is an exceptional company, built by an exceptional team with an exceptional dedication to their customers. We are honored to co-lead Pennylane’s financing round with Sequoia and Meritech.